Reddit: How Do You Break Into Big Subs Without Getting Instabanned?

[algospider]

Hi,
so I’m building a platform for a niche audio community (won’t say the niche here, but it’s one of those communities that lives almost entirely on Reddit).
Naturally, the biggest subs in this space get a ton of traffic… and of course that’s where I’d love to promote what I’m building.
The problem? I get banned instantly for anything that remotely looks like marketing.

Posts, comments, even “hey check this out” gets auto-removed. Mods are super strict, which I get, because these subs are all creator-focused and they want to keep things clean... it makes growth nearly impossible.

So what I ended up doing:

1. I started my own subreddit as a kind of neutral space.
2. Every day I post some “Daily Highlights” (basically a disguised version of creator rankings, but I keep it anonymous enough not to look like promo).
3. Then I DM the creators who show up in those highlights just to let them know. Not pitching, just “hey, you popped up today, nice work.” That surprisingly opens a lot of conversations.

But here’s where I am having trouble:
All the real traffic sits in the big subs — and I have no clue how to get visibility there without tripping the self-promo alarms.

Has anyone here actually figured this out? I feel like everyone says “Reddit is gold for niche communities,” but nobody talks about how tough it is if you’re building something for those communities and the subs don’t allow any kind of external links.

Curious if anyone found a way to crack this without burning accounts.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Sometimes, thems the breaks. Just because it exists doesn't mean it's exploitable. Take this forum for example. No spam or self-promo, ever, unless through official channels.

With that in mind, have you checked what it would cost to advertise your platform directly in these subreddits? And maybe its even cheaper if you promote your subreddit itself.

It sounds like they may be watching a feed of comments and threads, otherwise you could go into old threads that haven't been auto-closed for new comments, and drop comments in those. I enter Reddit through old threads all the time through Google, and I often search through old threads on Reddit itself. You could plant seeds this way, especially by using Google to first see which threads are ranking there.

 

[algospider]

@Ryuzaki thank you for your awesome answer!

Do you just Check Rankings or do you use any Tool to sort out Posts?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Ryuzaki thank you for your awesome answer!

Do you just Check Rankings or do you use any Tool to sort out Posts?

You could automate some of the process but I wouldn't automate the posting. I'd do that manually.

For finding threads you could the basic "site:reddit.com" or even tag on specific sub-reddits, and do all this manually, or you could probably fire up something like Scrapebox to grab the top 20 for a ton of keywords and then de-dupe the list. You could then write some script to go through and find which threads say "comments are closed" or whatever phrasing they use, and get rid of those too. This would get you a list of open threads to deal with.

Scrapebox might be able to do this part, though I'm not sure. I know it has the means to find text on the page, especially specific anchor texts. Not sure if you can get it to do text-only without an <a> tag wrapped around it. I actually just searched it and apparently there's a "Page Scanner Addon" that has "PageMustContain" or "DoStepIf". So you can definitely target specific footprints and then categorize them to filter them out.